Royal Academy of Music – Into the Woods

Picture: Craig Fuller

Into the Woods was performed by students from the Royal Academy of Music’s Musical Theatre Company at the Susie Sainsbury Theatre, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

There are giants in the sky but none left a deeper imprint on musical theatre or resonated so enduringly with aspiring young performers as Stephen Sondheim. In London alone this so-called summer we’ve seen some outstanding student productions, a stunning Sweeney Todd from the London School of Musical Theatre, a bold Sunday in the Park at Mountview and now an easy-to-love Into the Woods from the Royal Academy of Music. And, just five weeks hence, a different Into the Woods at Southwark from the ambitious National Youth Music Theatre.

His influence is everywhere. In June we saw the crème de la crème of these dazzling triple threats doing battle for the Sondheim Society Student Performer of the Year title at the Sondheim Theatre. Out of a field of 330 with lofty ambitions, RAM’s Madeleine Morgan acted, sang, was The Baker’s Wife recalling her ‘Moments in the Woods’ when she briefly swapped her humdrum existence for a leafy dalliance with a Prince, vain and uncaring though he was “raised to be charming, not sincere”, to become the 16th winner of this prestigious award.

It was the part she was later to play for some of the run of Into the Woods at RAM’s lovely in-house theatre. On occasions, as casts were exchanged to give more a chance to show their versatility, Morgan played a cow, not any old cow but the lovable but ultimately forlorn Milky White.

Now if Sir Ian McKellen can be Mother Goose, it’s no come-down for a reigning SSSSPOTY champion to be a cow. After all, Milky is a key part of the colourful chaos that Sondheim and his fellow-genius collaborator James Lapine cooked up in the 1980s and called Into the Woods, taking four famous Brothers Grimm fairytales – stories everyone knew, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella and Rapunzel – mashing them up and telling them from a different angle, using a childless couple, the Baker and his wife, to tie the piece’s emotional content together. In order to lift the curse of being childless, they must bring the Witch four objects: a cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair as yellow as corn and a slipper as pure as gold. In other words, they have to mess up everybody else’s fairy story!

To get what they want they have to lie or cheat a little and Lapine poses the question: what happens when we get what we want but still want more and what if the cost of our dreams outweighs the rewards? In return for getting her beauty back, the raddled Witch discovers she has to forfeit her magic powers. Everything comes at a price and in the darker Act II people die or are maimed, the remaining characters having to band together in a show of community responsibility to make amends for what the stunts they pulled to achieve “happy ever after”.

The moral: be careful what you wish for. Sondheim’s sublime lyrics – “People make mistakes, Fathers, Mothers, People make mistakes, Holding to their own, Thinking they’re alone; Just remember, Someone is on your side, No one is alone” – and the truth of lines like “Wishes come true, not free” and “Nice is different than good” get to the very heart of this quirky piece which turns out to be far deeper than the frolicsome and funny fairytale mash-up it appears on first acquaintance.

Director Bruce Guthrie returns after getting a five-star Merrily We Roll Along out of the Class of 2022 and follows up by teasing the best from the Class of 2024. In the cast version I saw, Madeleine Jackson-Smith inhabited the Baker’s Wife’s character so perfectly she looked as if she belonged on the stage, Talia Mai’s American-accented Little Red Riding Hood’s smug ‘I Know Things Now’ after her experiences with the big bad Wolf was cheekiness personified, Christina Licatalosi’s rich-voiced Cinderella was a constant thrill, particularly with that showstopper ‘On the Steps of the Palace’, and Anna Eckhard’s ‘Last Midnight’, ‘Witch’s Lament’ and ‘Stay With Me’ possessed a wonderful clarity of tone. It was interesting to see the Witch was male (Chad Saint Louis) in the Cast A version I sadly didn’t see.

Cormac Diamond as Jack feasted on one of the biggest numbers ‘Giants in the Sky’, Zach Burns and Tom Newland effectively swapped Baker and Mysterious Man depending on which cast you saw, Sebastien Diaquoi might have been a little more frightening as the lip-smackingly lascivious Wolf in ‘Hello, Little Girl’, the two princes, the deep-voiced Kristian Thorkildsen and Christian Clark, thankfully didn’t go too OTT for their laughs on ‘Agony’ and I felt the pain as the blood poured out of the toes of Cinderella’s stepsisters, played by Valentine Fauste-Gay and Paulina De Pavia, vainly trying to cheat their way into the golden slipper and a date with the Prince in their pantoesque scene on the palace steps.

There were one or two little innovations by Guthrie like giving Red Riding Hood a Sat Nav to navigate the woods but it was generally an unflashy interpretation. We were asked to imagine Milky White rather than be presented with any puppetry or a wind-up plastic model and Rapunzel’s tower was no more than a pulley and two ropes but that was no hardship.

Ben Hartley’s twinkling choreography and Loren Elstein’s costumes, the Witch’s coat of many colours most impressive, were spot-on and musical director Isaac Adni’s 15-strong Musical Theatre Orchestra played Sondheim’s playful score with flair, love and respect. Props too for Rick Fisher’s lighting and Mike Walker’s sound, especially in the Act II giant rumblings.

At just a few minutes short of three hours with a generous interval (much needed after that marathon 85-minute Act I), it’s a long show but I lost concentration only once. Otherwise, a triumph.

All that remains is to wish these graduates godspeed and good luck as they venture into the big, often-cruel world outside. You’ve made a terrific start but remember “Witches can be right, giants can be good, YOU decide what’s right, YOU decide what’s good” and be careful what you wish for…

Jeremy Chapman